


if "i love you" was a promise...

by Prettything_uglylie



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bottom Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Character Study, F/F, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Implied Sexual Content, Internal Conflict, Internal Monologue, M/M, Multi, Platonic Relationships, Platonic Sex, Polyamory, Queerplatonic Relationships, Sexual Content, Team as Family, bit of pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:54:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26296744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prettything_uglylie/pseuds/Prettything_uglylie
Summary: Sebastien "Booker" Lelivre considers loving the team in ways more intimate than some through the course of his long life.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache & Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Joe | Yusuf al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Booker | Sebastian le Livre/Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolo di Genova, Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Everyone, Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Nicky | Nicolo di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 16
Kudos: 80





	if "i love you" was a promise...

**Author's Note:**

> hey, i just watched this movie and I couldn't stop thinking about how tragic a character Booker is as well as how good the movie is?? i just think it's Neat so here this is!

He loses his family. He loses his wife and his children to time, has to watch as his wife's skin stretches and greys and decreases and even his sons' skin creep into the hollows of their bones. He buries them all, buries them all but never buries his youngest son, a little boy named Jean-Pierre who they had all called Johnny through his childhood, turns sick and angry, and asks, _why can't I be like you, Dad?_

He doesn't know. 

He doesn't know and it drives him mad. 

* * *

He sleeps with Andy first, a situation that no one least of all, them, are too surprised about. It's one of those days after a mission, one that had left Nicky bloodied, leading to Joe rushing him upstairs to their shower and then likely to their bedroom but they had all been nervous - it had taken a tick too long for Nicky to stand up and they had all been eaten at by nausea. 

Andy's blue eyes are filled with something similar to panic as she chugs from the whiskey bottle directly but he sees the apathy attempting to squash her feelings in her eyes and he does not scold her for the action. _Maybe she'll actually deal with her problems if she gets drunk,_ he thinks which is funny coming from him, really.

She presses herself against him and tells him the story of a woman named Quynh with a glint in the windows to her heart that reminds him of his own brown orbs when he talks about his wife. Quynh is a special name though, one he hasn't heard properly in his decades still alive with her but that seems significant. 

Andy talks about her like she finally had something she loved before she lost it. 

He gets it, just as he gets more and more. 

They have sex downstairs in that living room, multiple times, and multiple positions until it feels like their hunger, their brokenness, their fear has been fed. The codependence feels stronger like this and suddenly he is brutally hit by the memory of her straddling his cock and bouncing up and down, eyes set into his and he had realized: _she has the same blue eyes as his wife._

Laying together in the post-coital, she tells him hushedly that she wants a bit of time off to herself. 

He gives it to her: freedom, redemption, time, love - he has no use to keep it anymore. 

* * *

The next morning, Nicky and Joe will bounce down the stairs, elated smiles on both of their faces and when she hugs them goodbye, they both know immediately. Nicky asks _how long?_ in that way where he always knows the answer to while Joe hugs her tight enough he sees the man's knuckles go white. 

He will pour the rest of himself into them and he will love every moment. 

* * *

While having sex with Andy was inevitable, he had never thought he'd sleep with another one of their group. In a fate more powerful than the Bible itself, Nicky and Joe have seemed to have found each other as soulmates, two halves of a heart blended together and desperate to be as such. 

This is the reason when he wakes up one night, boxers tented and the ghastly images of Nicolo on his knees, looking up at him with those sharp-shooter eyes as he sucks him off, he does not even consider doing anything about it. 

In fact, he takes a cold shower and curses himself out as worthless for about an hour before Yusuf knocks on the door and asks, "You using all of our water?" 

It comes to a head, though, as it always does, when he finds them having sex in the kitchen. For how dirty the scene sounds, the intimacy of it makes up for the location, with Nicky's long legs bracketed over the muscles of Joe's hips where he lays on their dining table. Joe's thrusts are careful and small, just enough to rock the table and Nicky, enough to make Nicky make small breathy noises he has to strain to hear with their mouths swapping between pressing together, being only separated by atoms or murmuring reassurances to one another in languages ranging from English to Italian.

 _They fuck like they're about to die,_ he notes sadly, _like they're holding back tears._

It's such an intimate affair even he feels like he's intruding but Joe glances up from when he had gone to exit the room and the door had creaked and he had smiled. 

"Hi, Booker." 

Nicky's sniper eyes meet his and they're oddly wide for how shot out the pupils are and no part of Sebastien feels right seeing them in this state so he points over his shoulder and aims to say something but Joe teases again, still buried inside of his boyfriend - they hate the word but by all definition, what else can he call them? Lovers feel too on-the-nose in this moment and soulmates is too assumption-based - and garnering a swat from their sharpshooter, 

"What d'ya think?" Nicky's swat is not hard where it lands on his shoulder and his analytical eyes are still watching Booker like he thinks at any minute the other is going to freak out or in that way that is too Nicky-like, that he knows the answers to all of the universe. 

He aims for sarcastic and teasing in return, "Does he always fuck you like that, Nicky? Seems a little...slow." 

It falls flat. 

The jab is meant to spark a bit of competition into Joe that lies at the base of their relationship (it had started because back when he was a few weeks into this, he had said he finds Nicky attractive and Joe had went on a spiel about how Nicky was blessed by the Gods with his looks and will remain a penchant in his brain to grasp every bit of love in his heart for himself. he had gotten the message) but Joe and Nicky share a look, a quizzical one that confuses him for a moment. 

The look is one of the silent communication techniques they've mastered over those centuries in love with one another and it makes him feel like an invader again. Even their nude bodies feel more comfortable than their genuine intimacy.

In a careful pull from Nicky's body, one that makes him keen but Joe brushes his hand across his forehead and murmur, "I'm sorry, il mio amore." 

"Think you can do better?" He asks after stepping away from Nicky and the taller man remains leisure on the table as though it is a bed or any decent place to have sex. 

He takes him up on it, fucks Nicky hard and fast and does not kiss him as they both scream out their orgasm, Nicky the loudest he's ever been, as Joe watches, patrols. They kiss after for a long time until he pulls out. They wish him a _goodnight_ and he sleeps alone. 

He doesn't think he could do better. 

* * *

He doesn't think he could do better. 

Or be better. 

Maybe that's why he agrees to Copley's plan. 

Maybe it's to die. 

He doesn't have answers. 

* * *

Joe and he are the ones on the team with the most obvious underlying distrust and confusing dynamic, launched into by the comment he had made about Nicky - sometimes, to this day, he had wondered if Joe was more upset about him talking about his lover like that or about how small the comment had seemed - but kept by numerous small things. 

_If only he knew -_

They end up arguing about something - something, Nicky would tell you later wit a soft smile that he'd go to war for and that he knows Joe would die for real for, on that show Jeopardy. It's a real Old Man Argument but they end up yelling about it, both a little addicted to the feeling of the fight as they yell. 

Nicky watches them with dark eyes as they take it upstairs, slamming each other into walls and doors and sticking their hands up each other's shirt until they have sex. Booker takes a dick for the first time and he wonders if his wife's ghost is weeping. 

Nicky watches them with his philosophical, capable-of-murder eyes. He's keeping track this time but as though allowing himself the lavish, he watches the riples of muscle in Joe's back hungrily. 

They kiss again after. 

It had been funny in a deeply fucked up way, he had felt too full taking it but now, he felt too empty.

* * *

They make each other better. 

It's so clear to see it and now that Andy is off on her self-imposed exile trip, it is all he can see and think about and notice. 

It makes him empty and desperate and he's never felt more alone than with them, even though he knows they'd never want him to feel like that. 

It makes him want to die. 

It's not pretty or filled with love, what he has with himself. 

* * *

The same night he has sex with Joe for the first and only time, they pin Nicky between them and the second round and both take turns on the Italian. He takes it well, moaning gratefully for them both and it's easy enough to forget the increased intimacy between the two of them until Joe calms him with 'mio amore' and they say they love each other between breathy gasps. 

Nicky reads him, curls a hand in his and thrusts down on his cock with those _you will find someone who loves you_ eyes. 

It makes it worse. 

* * *

He makes the betrayal to them all, too lonely and broken to really fathom what he's doing. 

He doesn't have anything left. 

**Author's Note:**

> i wonder if there's still a fandom for this lol.  
> Hope you liked it! Kudos and comments are appreciated greatly!


End file.
